From Clones to Genre

aka: Genre Launch

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"I'm hesitant to use the term Grand Theft Auto clone anymore, because open world games are becoming so ubiquitous that the term feels hopelessly quaint, like how we used to call First Person ShootersDoom clones."

While genres can be known for a variety of works, they don't always start out that way. Usually they start out as loads of obvious Follow the Leader copies of a Genre-Busting or making work, or a Genre Popularizer for a genre so small that this is the first time the mainstream has heard of it. Eventually many of the followers stop being that (though copies still exist), and start having loads of works that stand on their own. This is the point that you don't just have a bunch of clones, you have a full genre.

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This doesn't always happen, though. Mascot Racers have yet to go past just being Mario Kart clones in spite of both Mario Kart and the clones having been around since The '90s. On the other hand, this can happen almost immediately. Tetris was such a simple game, any clone needed to set itself apart to avoid getting sued.

Compare Derivative Differentiation (which can be used to help the clones stand out on their own). A Trope Codifier can invert this, if it comes long after the Trope Maker and the original genre was relatively differentiated and well-established before then, and it's followed by a sequence of clones.

Sailor Moon bears the title of being both Trope Codifier and Genre Popularizer of the Magical Girl Warrior genre, but it also started a fad of similar shows trying to repeat the formula. This led to everyMagical Girl show being called a "Sailor Moon ripoff" for decades, especially in the west, even though they'd actually gone From Clones to Genre very quickly. This slowly dropped off as showsforadifferentaudience drew the people who were calling "ripoff" into the genre and Pretty Cure, a shoujo series that kept the action of an action-adventure shonen series, kept them there... until Glitter Force, the Americanized dub of Smile Pretty Cure!, was released onto Netflix. Suddenly, people who hadn't watched anime since the early nineties were calling "Sailor Moon ripoff!" all over again, making the entire magical girl fandom groan, "We'd finally gotten past all that!"

In Japan, the aforementioned outliers started to get so popular that they solicited cries of "clone" to other series on their own. Dark Magical Girl works get called "Madoka Clones" (Even with works that came before it like Magical Girl Raising Project), heavily actionized series get called "Precure Clones", and overly technological series get called "Nanoha Clones".

Film (Live-Action)

Found-footage horror films got their start with Cannibal Holocaust in 1980. The Blair Witch Project in 1999 proved that the genre could be commercially successful, but it took the success of Paranormal Activity in the US and [REC] in Europe, both in 2007note Well, technically. Paranormal Activity saw its first festival screenings that year, but wasn't released theatrically until 2009. [REC], meanwhile, took until 2008 to reach the UK, and 2009 to reach the US., to prove that the style could be used to tell more stories than just riffs on Blair Witch.

Gonzo Journalism was launched by "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved", written by Hunter S. Thompson for "Scanlan's Monthly" in May 1970. Scanlan's named what Thompson did—basically send his notebook of whiskey-soaked observations from the weekend in for publication barely edited—"gonzo", and Thompson more or less went along with it to both the style and the name. Afterward, both he and other writers aimed to reproduce the style of that one article. Today, various other authors have put their own spin on the style, transforming it from "Hunter S. Thompson clones" to "a form of journalism started by Hunter S. Thompson."

Kids' novels taking the form of the protagonist's diary had been an established format for years, such as Jim Benton's popular series Dear Dumb Diary. The popularity of Diary of a Wimpy Kid when it got published and its lined paper design with sketches from the main character himself pushing the old diary format into found literature territory inspired a whole glut of epistolary children's novels accompanied with drawings in its wake (Dork Diaries, The Loser List, etc).

While Trapped in Another World, Reincarnation, and RPG-Mechanics Verse stories are hardly new concepts, web novel works like Mushoku Tensei and Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken were popular enough to inspire plenty of independent web-serialized stories where a character ends up transporting or getting reincarnated into a JRPG-like fantasy land. They started catching steam around the early 2010's, and the handiness of the Fan Fiction Dot Net/Archive of Our Own-like platform Shousetsu Ka ni Narou to publish these series led to "Narou Isekai" ("Narou-style Parallel World") and "Narou Tensei" ("Narou Reincarnation") stories becoming considered a genre in their own right. The ubiquity of these stories getting published, adapted into variousmedia and translated and exported out past Japan led to those specific types of stories being classified as part of the "Isekai" genre in the West.

Twilight made quite a stir among the young adult readers and became exceptionally popular. For quite some time after Twilight's release, other "Paranormal Romance" books such as the House of Night series and the Vampire Academy series were referred to as "Twilight ripoffs". It took the movies for Vampire Academy and The Mortal Instruments being released for people to start using the term "paranormal romance" instead of calling them "Twilight ripoffs".

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Music

Post Britpop. Started by the countless imitators of Radiohead's The Bends and OK Computer albums, of which the most defining were Travis's The Man Who for the folksy variety, and Doves' Lost Souls for the art-rock variety.

Several critics (such as this one) have expressed skepticism of the use of the term "djent" as a generic label in its own right, arguing that all of the bands in the so-called genre have yet to move past simply imitating Meshuggah.

Nu Metal was formed when KoRn released their self titled debut album in 1994 to unexpected success. Naturally, many bands took note of their downtuned guitars, funk-influenced bass playing, angsty lyrics, and equal use of all instrumentation, and then ran with that formula in hopes of achieving that same success. The name comes from an interview with Coal Chamber.

Tabletop Games

While trading cards had been around for years, 1993's Magic: The Gathering made them into an actual game. It was not the first — the earliest collectible card game was published in the late 19th century — but it was the first real success. This prompted a glut of trading card games that were very similar to Magic. The turning point came in the late '90s, with the success of very different trading card games like Legend of the Five Rings and Decipher's Star Wars TCG.

In 2008, Donald X. Vaccarino took the idea of each player using a deck, a la Magic: The Gathering, and put a new spin on it. What if, instead of players creating their deck ahead of time and bringing to the match, players had to start with the same limited deck and build it up from the same pool of cards as their opponent? Thus was born Dominion, which launched an entire genre that would be known as deck-building games. There were a fair number of forgettable clones, but games like Ascension, Thunderstone, and Marvel Legendary have established reputations as excellent games in their own right, by playing around with themes and mechanics based on Dominion's main ideas.

The Pokémon franchise spawned craze in Japan for anything with collectable monsters, that would later be imitated by series such as Dragon Quest (via the Dragon Quest Monsters series) and Telefang (which overseas was ironically sold as a bootleg Pokemon game, after being poorly translated). The collectable monster concept proved successful as a card game as well, when the Pokemon card game was released. This success would lead to Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Monsters becoming extremely successful. The success of Yu-Gi-Oh! lead to imitators trying to get on the bandwagon of making a show about a game, so that kids will want to buy the real version. With so many shows like this out there nowadays, such as Duel Masters, Beyblade, Battle B-Daman, Medabots, Bakugan, and Chaotic just to name a few, one could say that "Card Game Animes" have become a genre. They all feature a tournament arc, talking about what the game is "truly about", and posing dramatically while playing the game.

It should be noted that the concept of actually capturing monsters to fight with was first shown, in fact, with Dragon Quest V. The Pokémon series was in development at the time, though, and although it didn't start the trend it did refine it, becoming the precursor to what Monster Battling is today.

Genres exist in Journal Roleplay too. Though it's still fairly different from the modern understanding, Drama Drama Duck was the beginning of "reverse jamjars", where characters meet at an interdimensional hub (though in this case it's the Internet) at their own discretion and still live in their own worlds. Island is usually credited as the first crack jamjar, and Landels, its successor Damned, and Econtra made horror into a journal game genre by developing the usual traits of a horror RP — for example, free reign for character death but having it come at a price, powers being limited or removed, a mystery the players don't know the answer to, and the event system, common in other games for silly fun, being used to break the characters' spirits.

This is still happening now. For example, multifandom games based on existing canons began with things like Marshmallow Mateys and had Soul Campaign as the Trope Codifier, and those got more and more diverse, to the point that they've started their own genres that don't have to be based on existing properties. The two biggest instances are wide-world jamjars with player stat micromanagement (previously known as Route 29 clones) and short-term, small-cast mystery games (usually called "murdergames" and previously known as Dangan Roleplay clones).

Video Games

As in the quote, the First-Person Shooter started out with the template codified by Doom, to the point that those that came after were commonly called "Doom clones." The turning points are largely accepted to be GoldenEye for consoles and Half-Life on PC, which integrated the gameplay with a stronger focus on story and giving actual goals and objectives more complex than "get to the exit, kill everything along the way". There are a variety of FPS sub-genres, such as Tactical Shooters (which themselves are split between more arcadey games like Call of Duty, more realistic but still accessible ones like Rainbow Six, and outright simulators like ARMA), ones with Role-Playing Game elements like Deus Ex and Borderlands, and multiplayer-only ones like Team Fortress 2, itself the progenitor of several clones that eventually lead to the Hero Shooter.

Roguelikes are an odd case; the term has been used to refer to plenty of games with wildly varied mechanics, and only two things in common: Randomly Generated Levels and item placement, and permadeath with no way to recover saved games. Everything from The Binding of Isaac to Minecraft's hardcore mode qualifies, in a way. Yet the name continues to stick because nobody's ever agreed on a better one.

Rogue-lite is becoming a more common term to refer to games that only have those elements, while Roguelike is more restricted to games that are actually similar to Rogue. It's arguable whether either could really be counted as a genre; they are more a set of gameplay elements that can be applied to games in nearly any other genre.

Minecraft can be argued to have spawned (or popularised) two types of genres, voxel-based sandbox games as well as Survival Sandbox games. While the concept of building blocks in a video game was not new by any stretch of the imagination note Despite being commonly referred to as "Virtual LEGO" Minecraft's creator Notch had said Lego had nothing to do with the creation of the game. One it was largely inspired by though was Infiniminer, Minecraft put it together in such a unique package that it was bound to attract imitators, such as FortressCraft, to games inspired by it, such as Terraria. However such a plethora of games with similar concepts but large twists are coming out now (Ace of Spades, GunCraft, Mythruna, etc), that it is far too many to count, and many of them are standing up on their own merits.

Other "Survival Games" are cropping up as well. Directly-competing games like Rust and 7 Days to Die came out at pretty much the same time.

The term Metroidvania is used to describe platformers that have a large continuous map, and the progress is governed by acquiring new abilities rather than through Event Flags. The term is now used as a genre, but was originally used to refer to the Castlevania games that used this formula, in the same sense that they'd be called Metroid clones, since Metroid did the formula first.

Games in the same vein as Dear Esther were frequently compared to it, or described using the dismissive label "walking simulators." Eventually these games became varied and populated enough to be considered a genre in their own right, under the term Environmental Narrative Games.

Diablo-clone used to be a common term for what are now usually called action-RP Gs. However, action-RPG has spread to be applied to such a wide variety of different games that terms like Diablo-clone are coming back into more frequent use again.

Web Original

Random Assault: First as a homage to Talk Radar, Random Assault then became it's own thing like PCN-Gen, KGB, GNA, and Pixel Heroes.

Nowadays, concepts used in the Journal Roleplay are no longer seen as ripoffs of previous games.

Sages of Chaos, initially a Kingdom Hearts-styled "dressing room" (essentially a way to test out playing characters), was the first "multiversal dressing room" game (meaning characters from all canons were welcome). Nowadays, these sorts of communities are the norm.

Island RP was the first game to use the concept of the "closed world" RP game or "jamjar." Nowadays, "Jamjars" or even "spooky jamjars" are quite the norm.

Drama Drama Duck was the first game to do the reverse and create a "nexus", where canons can all meet together without getting stuck in another universe. This one isn't used just as much.

The Sky Tides was the first game to take an AU route with their characters. This one is just as used as "Jamjars".

Dangan Roleplay was the first game to utilize the "murdergame" or the murder mystery RPG style in the same vein as Danganronpa. This one is starting to gain in popularity.

Virtual YouTuber personalities. Popularized by the self-styled "first virtual YouTuber" Kizuna Ai, later got to the point that official 3D model developers and media companies started lending assistance to them to bring them up to the level of real life internet stars.

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